There is a saying that goes: “Be careful what you wish for, it might just come true.” This has been Israel’s dilemma from the very beginning.
The Zionist movement, which held its first conference 120 years ago in Basel, Switzerland, wanted Palestine but not the Palestinians. They achieved this objective 50 years later in what Israel termed as its “war of independence.”
Then in 1947-48, the Palestinian homeland was captured, and millions of its people were cruelly evicted following a harrowing war and many massacres.
That dynamic was not at work when the rest of historic Palestine was occupied during the war of 1967.
Ali Jarbawi, a professor of political science at Birzeit University, told the Economist that Palestinians were “lucky” they “were defeated so fast and so massively.”
The rapid events of the war made it too difficult for Israel to ethnically cleanse East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, as it did to hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages, during what its civilians call the Nakba of 1948 — the “catastrophic” loss of their homeland.
Well, perhaps “lucky” is a bit of a stretch, since the last 50 years of military occupation has wrought untold pain and misery on Palestinians. It has been a period in which international law has repeatedly been violated by Israel. It has been a period in which Palestinians escalated their resistance, non-violent for most of it, but at times less so. The price was, and remains, terribly high.
This resultant reality drove Israeli commentator, Gideon Levy, to declare in a recent article in Haaretz that in the “terrible summer of 1967,” Israel had “won a war and lost nearly everything.”
The loss that Levy refers to is hardly material. “A state that celebrates 50 years of occupation is a state whose sense of direction has been lost, its ability to distinguish between good and evil, impaired,” he wrote.
The loss for Palestinians, however, was far greater. They watched as Arab armies were either defeated on a massive scale, or they simply evacuated their positions, conceding East Jerusalem with little fight.
Indeed, the defeat brought shame, but also the realization that Palestinians must claim their own position at the center of the fight. The events of the war made that realization quite effortless.
On the morning of June 5, 1967, the entire Egyptian Air Force was destroyed, its entire fleet still sitting on the tarmac. Within the next 24 hours, the air forces of Jordan and Syria were also pounded.
Fifty years later, it is crystal clear that military solutions have failed. That apartheid can only contribute to further strife, bring more pain and misery, but never true peace.
Ramzy Baroud
MORE: http://www.arabnews.com/node/1110211